Randy’s Blog

In the early 1990s, during the time I was reading comics, Marvel launched a title featuring a new superhero named Darkhawk. 

He's really Chris Powell, a teenage kid who finds a mysterious amulet in an abandoned amusement park. Just by holding the amulet and wishing, he can transform into Darkhawk, a powerful being with all kinds of super abilities. With another wish, he can transform back into his teenage self. I bought a few of the early issues at the time and really liked it. Due to my meager funds, however, I couldn't afford to continue buying it, so I gradually lost interest in the hero. But I always remembered how great those few issues were, and how cool Darkhawk was.

A few years ago, Marvel announced a new Marvel Unlimited service. For $70 a year, you can read digital versions of over 17,000 Marvel titles using their mobile app. I signed up, and reading Marvel comics quickly became the main reason I used my tablet. (A 10" tablet is roughly the same size as a comic book.) One of the first things I looked for was Darkhawk, but it was not available. 17,000 titles is a lot, but it's nowhere near the number of comics Marvel has published in its long history. I easily found other exciting comics to read, though, so the service was (and still is) a great value.

Once again, time passed, and all thoughts of Darkhawk subsided. But that all changed late last year, on the night of November 7th. That night I had a dream I went to a comic book store and found nearly every issue of Darkhawk, including the annuals. I bought them all. The total was $39, and I had $40 in my dream wallet. I was stoked!

When I woke up the next morning, I checked Marvel Unlimited first thing, to see if Darkhawk was available (they add a few dozen comics to it every week; some new issues, some old issues), but it wasn't. So I searched the internet for any Darkhawk news, and I almost couldn't believe it, but I found some! A couple of days before my dream, Marvel issued a press release and buried at the very bottom was a note that Darkhawk would be added to the Marvel Unlimited library later that very month! Just like in the dream, I was stoked.

I didn't have to wait long. About a week later, on November 13th, Darkhawk was added. I eagerly jumped in and read them, and they were just as good as I remembered. But soon I discovered a problem: only the first 9 issues had been added, and the Darkhawk series ran for 50! This was a bummer. It had taken several years for the first 9 issues to make their way to Marvel Unlimited. I had a feeling it would be several more years for the remaining issues to do the same.

I felt defeated, but still somehow stubbornly attached to the idea of reading every issue of Darkhawk. So I traveled to a local comic book store and combed through their entire back issue selection: the high-value back issue bin, the one-dollar back issue bin, even the fifty-cent back issue bin. When I left the store, I had five new Darkhawk issues. My entire set of Darkhawk comics, including the ones I bought in the '90s, now included these:

• 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 12, 25, 34, 36, 44

At this point I realized how futile it would be to track down all the Darkhawk issues at comic book stores. It would take forever! But how else could it be done? I visited a few internet-based comic book stores, and saw that I could search for each issue, select what condition I wanted it in (mint, near mint, very fine, fine, etc), add it to my cart, and repeat for the next issue, but for some reason that didn't feel like the best solution. So for a few days, I was stumped.

Finally, the light bulb turned on inside my head.

The answer was ebay!!

I searched through ebay's listings and discovered the mother lode: someone was selling the entire run of Darkhawk: issues 1-50 plus all 3 annuals, just like in my dream. It was not $39 like my dream, but it was just slightly over $1 per issue, which seemed quite reasonable. I bought it, and 3 days later a big box of comics was delivered to our front porch.

Over the next couple of weeks, I read the entire series. It had obviously been canceled after issue 50, so I was expecting the writing to get really bad in the latter half of the series, thus leading to the cancellation. It really didn't, though. The entire series was written by the same writer, Danny Fingeroth, and while he made some changes to the character in the latter half that I didn't like, the issues were always surprisingly well written. Sometimes when the writing in comics is bad, it feels like a chore to keep reading, but that never happened with Darkhawk. It always kept me engaged and interested in what happened next.

What I really enjoyed about the series was how much Chris Powell struggled both in his personal life and as a superhero. His father, a police officer, disappears after taking bribes from a mobster. His mother, a lawyer, is prosecuting the same mobster, and dealing with threats and assassination attempts. Chris tries to use his Darkhawk identity as "an edge against crime" to try to find his father and protect his mother, all while keeping his identity secret and trying to help raise his younger twin brothers.

His attempts at being a superhero are extremely amateurish. In one of my favorite scenes, he fights a group of villains when Daredevil shows up to help him out. Darkhawk yells "Daredevil! Wow!", which prompts Daredevil to think to himself: "Wow? This Darkhawk character is new!" Over the course of the series, Chris' increasingly erratic schedule gets him kicked out of his house and suspended from school, so he has to find a cheap apartment and get a job with flexible hours. Throughout the series he often wonders if he's doing the right thing.

I'd never heard of the writer, Danny Fingeroth, before, so after I finished the series, I looked him up. He was a long-time writer and editor for the various Spider-Man comics, which made sense, since Darkhawk always seemed to fight a Spider-Man villain.

In the past decade or so, instead of writing comics he's been analyzing comics, such as his book, Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us about Ourselves and Our Society, and this 2004 article in the L.A. Times about Spider-Man (the "regular-guy superhero").

He was even featured in a 2009 article in the Philosophy Now magazine:

I was pleased to see several references to Darkhawk in the article, including one about how he "agonizes about the rightness of his decisions". It refers to issue #18, where a group of villains is trying to kidnap a Russian scientist. Darkhawk, trying to protect him, takes action that accidentally causes the scientist's death. On the last page, Darkhawk thinks:

All I've ever wanted to do with the [amulet's] power was the right thing... That all I had to do was want to do the right thing -- and the right thing would get done. With no harm to anyone but the bad guys... Am I -- despite my good intentions -- a worse menace than those I fight?!

I'm sure this is all much more than you ever wanted to know about a superhero you didn't even know existed in the first place. So, in honor of Stan Lee, and without further ado:

'Nuff said!

You may recall last year I was excited about OU’s run through the NCAA tournament, resulting in a Final Four appearance. The team was led by senior Buddy Hield, who won several national player of the year awards, and was picked #6 in the NBA Draft by the New Orleans Pelicans. He grew up in the Bahamas, was an exciting player to watch, and seemed like a great guy, too. Genuine and full of enthusiasm.

So ever since the NBA season started, I had January 14th circled on my calendar. That was the day the Pelicans would come to Chicago to play the Bulls. I told myself if Buddy was getting playing time as a rookie, I would consider going. Well, he was getting playing time, a good 10-20 minutes per game, and he had made the starting lineup. He had also been getting better each month, and was named the Western Conference Rookie of the Month for December. All of this meant I decided to go to the game.

I checked nbatickets.com and found some surprisingly decent seats (3rd level, at center court, on the 2nd row) that weren’t too expensive. It probably helped that the Pelicans aren’t a good team. I bought the tickets, printed them out, and made our plans. On Saturday, we took the train to Chicago and then an Uber to the United Center. This was the first time we’d used Uber, and I think it was both cheaper and easier than getting a taxi.

This was also the first time I’d been to an NBA game. Here’s what went down:

The game started at 4pm, with gates opening at 2:30. We got there a few minutes before gates opened, and there were already a lot of people in line. Thankfully we didn’t have to wait long, and getting through the gates went quickly.

We walked around the arena for a bit and got to see the Bulls’ trophy case:

Then we found our seats and were fairly pleased with the view. We had seats at the end of the aisle, which was convenient.

There were lots of championship banners for the Bulls and Blackhawks, who also play in the United Center.

I spotted Joel Meyers, the play-by-play announcer for the Pelicans. I’ve watched him announce Big 12 football games on Fox in the past. He has a great voice, and is an excellent announcer. I really enjoy his commentary. When the NBA season started, I bought NBA League Pass so I could watch all the Pelicans games, and I was thrilled to see he was now calling games for them.

Buddy makes his first appearance! He's on the sideline in the hoodie.

Buddy then proceeds to make lots of 3 pointers during warm-ups:

A giant remote-controlled Bulls blimp flew around the stadium several times:

The announcement of the starting lineup for the Bulls was quite a dramatic event:

The Pelicans win the tip!

I was surprised how little of the game you could hear. There was music playing a fair amount of time, and we were far away from the court to begin with. I could hear the squeaks of sneakers, but it was hard to hear the whistle at times. And you couldn’t hear the ball bouncing on the court, or clanging off the rim. But still, it was fun to watch and experience. There was all kinds of entertainment going on during stoppages, so it never got boring.

Unfortunately, Buddy had one of his worst games in a while. He only scored 2 points and got 2 rebounds in 12 minutes of play. So that was disappointing. No one really expected the Pelicans to win, and they didn’t, but they did make a game of it. Dwayne Wade came through for the Bulls, though, hitting several clutch shots in the 4th quarter.

The final score was 107-99, Bulls. During the 4th quarter, Chick-fil-A ran a “Fowl Shot” promotion: if the Pelicans missed two consecutive free throws during the 4th, everyone in attendance would get a free chicken sandwich!

It was funny just how intense and loud the crowd got when the Pelicans shot a free throw. They really wanted that free chicken sandwich! But they were denied; the Pelicans made their free throws. The vegetarian part of me was secretly pleased.

After the game ended, we stayed in our seats for a while to let the crowd disperse. I noticed Buddy walk over and talk to Denzel Valentine, who plays for the Bulls. He’s also a rookie, and also won a few national player of the year awards last year.

When we left the United Center, it was time for dinner. I’d researched vegetarian options ahead of time, and we decided on a place called Native Foods Cafe. It was too far to walk, so we got another Uber ride.

The restaurant turned out to be really good! It’s actually a vegan restaurant, which means everything on their menu is plant-based. No dairy, eggs, or meat. Everything we had was delicious, and that included an oatmeal creme pie and a peanut butter parfait for dessert! It was so good that now I want to go back to Chicago so we can eat there again.

After dinner, since we were only a mile away, we walked back to the train station and eventually caught a train back home.

The whole trip was a lot of fun, with a lot of new adventures.

It's been a while since I've written about my Big 12 Sports river. It's still there, churning away, updating every hour or so with all the latest headlines about all things Big 12. I still check it daily. Most days I just skim the headlines to get a sense of what's going on. Sometimes a story will jump out at me, and I'll click the headline to read the story. And once in a great while, a story is so interesting that I'll send it to Wendy.

When I created the river (way back here and here), it occurred to me I didn't have any way to monitor the various RSS feeds that are used to pull the headlines. If something stopped working, I would never know, unless I actively went looking for problems. At the time, I decided to let the issue slide. It was a lot of work to create the river, and I was ready to take a break from working on it.

A few months ago, as the college football season was getting into full swing, I noticed I wasn't getting as many headlines as I had in previous seasons. So one weekend I decided to write a program to help me monitor problems. What I came up with was a program that sends me an email once a week, summarizing the daily number of posts from each RSS feed for the previous week. It looks like this:

I also added another table, which shows the most recent response code from each website's server:

Between the two tables, I can get a quick sense of what's going on. And having it emailed to me each week means I don't have to do anything! Just a quick glance at the email each week tells me if anything's wrong.

After creating this program, and running it for the first time, it was clear several things were wrong. After a bit of investigation I learned some things had changed in the 2 years since I created the river:

• In West Virginia, the Charleston Gazette and the Charleston Daily Mail newspapers merged into the Charleston Gazette-Mail. For me, this meant 2 RSS feeds were combined into 1 new feed.
• The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette seems to have stopped covering West Virginia sports entirely.
• The Austin American-Statesman seems to have dropped support for RSS feeds. This was mildly disappointing, but I'm not too sad that there are fewer Texas stories in the river.
• Five or six other websites changed the URL for their RSS feed, probably because they redesigned their website.

I fixed all of these issues and immediately noticed a lot more content in the river. It felt much better, like it had when I first created it.

Writing this program paid off the very next week, when I got my first automated weekly email. I immediately noticed two things:

The Topeka Capital-Journal had returned a "404 - Not Found" status for its Kansas and K-State feeds, and no posts had been recorded for either since the previous Tuesday. When I investigated the cause, I discovered the newspaper had changed the URL for both feeds the previous week. I updated the river with the new URLs, and everything was back to working.

I was extremely pleased that my new monitoring program paid off so quickly! 

So I think the lesson here is that many times, writing software is not enough. It helps to write software that monitors your software, and makes it almost effortless to keep tabs on how things are working.

I wrote about Leonard Cohen's new album, You Want It Darker, in a recent post. Just a few weeks after the album was released, he passed away at the age of 82. It wasn't too much of a surprise; he'd said his health was declining. But it was still a shock to see the headlines announcing his death. 

I'm so glad he was able to finish his last album. It's really good! It's my favorite of the albums he released this decade. I've embedded a couple of songs from it below. It was hard to limit myself to just two!

Note that if you're reading this via email, you may have to open this post in a browser to see them.

If I Didn't Have Your Love

On the Level

I hope you enjoy them as much I do!

It worked!

This morning I got an email like this:

Subject: Little Debbie Notifier: Cherry Cordials
Message:
Miles Store Name Address
0.66 Jewel 4222 Elm St Mchenry, IL 60050
7.11 Jewel 2401 Route 12 Spring Grove, IL 60081

Just like last time, they were not with the other Little Debbie snacks, but down the frozen food aisle in a special display of holiday treats.

This was the first such email I've gotten since around February, when cherry cordials went out of stock in my area. They're only available for a limited time during the holiday season, and they're delicious!

If you want to find out if they're available near you, you can search for Little Debbie snacks here.

The funny thing is that 2 nights ago I dreamed I found cherry cordials in a grocery store! My subconscious must have been tuned in to the local Little Debbie supplier.

Even if we hadn't watched Game 7 of the World Series, we would have known what happened. Around midnight on Wednesday, people started setting off fireworks in our neighborhood. That was true for pretty much every neighborhood, based on similar reports of coworkers. Evanston, IL actually set off their emergency sirens when the Cubs won.

We've been watching the Cubs throughout the postseason. It was crazy and historic to see them win. I can't imagine what lifelong Cubs fans must feel.

Dave Winer, the guy who invented blogs and has been blogging since the mid-90s, is a Mets fan. He blogged yesterday about trying to figure out if he's ever experienced anything close to what lifelong Cubs fans must be feeling. He decided he probably has, and created this:

If you made a list of all the things that could happen to increase the drama of the Cubs winning the World Series, many of them actually happened:

• Falling behind 3 games to 1
• Rallying to force a game 7
  
• Playing game 7 on the road
  
• Blowing a big lead late
  
• Going into extra innings
  
• Having a rain delay
  
• Allowing the other team to score in the bottom of the 10th
  

It's craziness. The parade was today and there were a lot fewer people at work than normal.

I can't imagine what Cleveland fans are feeling, either, but I can't help but think: thank goodness they won the NBA title this year. Otherwise, they would have lost the NBA Finals and a World Series in the same year, and their championship drought for any major sport would have continued.

Anyway, go Cubs!

Wendy and I have been big fans of Leonard Cohen, a Canadian poet/singer/songwriter, since our Colorado days, when Wendy first heard of him. He released a new album on Friday, You Want It Darker, at the age of 82! We've been looking forward to it since it was announced a couple months ago. This is his 3rd album this decade, which is an impressive feat. One of my coworkers said Cohen is a big inspiration to him on what you can accomplish later in life.

I think we started with a "Best of" Cohen album when we lived in Colorado, and then got a "More Best of" album. Over the years we've slowly collected all of his albums, and realized he has so many incredible songs, there's no way a "Best of" compilation can do justice to his work.

To go along with the new album, the New Yorker published a really long and interesting profile of him last week: Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker.

I almost never hear his songs on the radio. They tend to be deep meditations on love, death and religion, so they're not like typical mainstream music. Odds are, though, you've heard a cover of one his songs, Hallelujah:

During a book sale this summer, I picked up a copy of a graphic novel called The Sign of the Black Rock:

It looked like it was for kids, but I said what the heck and bought it anyway. I like graphic novels, and it was only a quarter, so I had nothing to lose. Recently I got around to reading it, figuring it would be a quick read and I could toss it in the donation pile when I was done.

But when I was done, I didn't want to get rid of it! It was really good. The art was great, the writing was even better, and the flow of action from panel to panel was superb. I've read a lot of graphic novels over the years, and there are lots of mediocre ones out there. When I come across a great one, it really sticks out.

So instead of getting rid of it, I looked up more about it, and about the author. It was the second of seven books in the Three Thieves series, written and drawn by Scott Chantler. I'd never heard of it before, but as luck would have it, the seventh book was just published this month! I collected the rest of the series and read them all in order, start to finish:

They are all excellent. The series is an "all-ages fantasy adventure" and has won several awards. I was most impressed with how well written it was. He put a lot of work into it!

I discovered his blog recently, and subscribed to it. What's interesting is that he's written about how he markets all of his work more like a book than a comic or graphic novel. As he puts it, he uses "content rather than form as a point of entry for people." He starts by making sure he creates a story that appeals to everyone, and then he attends writer's groups and book festivals and talks about his work. He sells more at book festivals than he does at comic conventions. Because of this approach, he gets fan mail from 80-year-olds.

There are a couple of other graphic novels he's written. One is called Two Generals, and is "about World War II, honouring a deceased relative, and personal family history." It was nominated for a bunch of awards. The other is called Northwest Passage, but oddly I couldn't find much about it on his website despite it also being nominated for awards. I haven't read either of these, but plan on checking them out soon.

Not bad for what looked like a kid's book at first glance!

A long time ago, I had a tattered, worn out copy of a book called "Strange Energies, Hidden Powers":

There was a chapter about pyramids and all the strange phenomena associated with them. Supposedly fruit lasted longer and razor blades got sharper inside a pyramid-shaped object. There was all sorts of other stuff I don't remember. But it made me curious, so I decided to run an experiment at the time. I made a small pyramid out of cardboard, and put the old razor I'd been shaving with inside. After several days, I took it out and shaved with it. My first thought was that it really was sharper! My second thought was that I really had no objective way to test the sharpness, so it might just be wishful thinking. Thus the result of my experiment was inconclusive.

Fast forward to earlier this year. I saw an article online about a "gold pyramid in Illinois". I'd never heard of it, and I thought it couldn't possibly be real, but I read the article anyway. And it turned out to be a real thing! In 1977, a pyramid-crazed man built a house for his family in the shape of a pyramid, and later had it plated in gold sheets. It became such a local sensation that he started offering tours of his house. I looked up where it was, and discovered it was only about 40 minutes from where we live! Crazy! I couldn't believe we'd lived here over 10 years and never heard about this before.

So I added it to the top of my to-do list, and when it was time for my birthday, I decided we should go check it out. I really didn't know what to expect, so I set my expectations fairly low. Most of the tour was actually a presentation by the son of the guy who built the house, and it turned out to be really entertaining. He talked about what it was like growing up with a pyramid-obsessed father and all the benefits and challenges they've had over the years with such an unusual house.

They also have a 3-pyramid, 4-car garage. And yes, they have a moat in front of their house (more on that later):

Even the fireplace is pyramid shaped!

The house has six floors. The first floor has a conference room and all sorts of Egyptian-themed artifacts:

There are several interesting things that happened to the family:

In the 1980's, after the house became a big sensation, the tourism branch of the Egyptian government got wind of it, called them, and said "You're getting a lot of people interested in Egypt. Why don't you start selling tours to Egypt?" So they did, and they sold a lot of them. The family got to go to Egypt a number of times, and eventually they sold so many tours that the Egyptian government allowed the family to go on a special behind-the-scenes tour where they got to see artifacts the public isn't allowed to see.

During one of the trips, the pyramid-obsessed father saw a large statue of King Ramses II, and decided he wanted one just like it. So he had one built:

It's 55 feet tall! There's an airport in a nearby town and apparently pilots really like the statue, because it's oriented due west, so it's easy to get their bearings from it.

The other crazy thing is that shortly after it was built, a natural spring appeared directly underneath their house. He said that in mythology, pyramids attract water. (I haven't tried to verify that yet.) So they rerouted some of the water and now they have a big pond for a backyard and a moat around their house. They also learned the spring water was drinkable, and due to popular demand, they've started bottling and selling it as Gold Pyramid Water.

I bought a few bottles (which are themselves shaped like pyramids), and it was pretty good. Normally I don't like water to have a taste. Their water did have a taste, but it was a good one. Apparently sometime next year it will be available to purchase in stores.

The guy did talk about some of the mysterious pyramid-power claims. He seemed to strike a good balance of not believing all the crazy claims, but also not taking history books and mainstream science as unshakable truth. 

So it was worth the trip in my opinion.

Every so often, when I see something interesting, I'll pull out my phone and take a picture. But then I promptly forget about it, and over time those one-off photos get drowned out amidst all the vacation pictures in my photo collection. So I've rescued a few of them from obscurity and assembled them below.

This photo is looking directly underneath my bird feeder. A bird and rabbit were sharing the bounty of seeds that had fallen to the ground:

Another photo underneath the bird feeder. This time a rabbit was just chillaxing in the yard:

A full moon rising over the nearby pond:

Our neighbors have fake deer in their yard. One evening as Wendy and I headed out for a walk, we noticed two real deer cautiously approaching the fake ones. They seemed a bit confused by their motionless comrades:

Last winter I noticed a huge bird on the fence in our back yard! I thought it was an owl at first, but after we looked at it through binoculars, we decided it was a red-tailed hawk. It sat there for at least 15-20 minutes. I wish you could see it more clearly, but this was the most my phone's camera would zoom in:

During a walk last fall, I was amazed at how many geese were in the pond, and how loud they were. I recorded a video, but by the time it started recording, the geese had begun to fly away. You can still see a lot of them, though:

Finally, these aren't random one-time photos, but I saw them in my collection and I don't think I ever shared them. Last fall we went to the Morton Arboretum to see the fall colors. When we got there, we discovered they were displaying a series of extremely impressive Lego sculptures. I took more pictures of Legos than I did of trees! Here are some of the most impressive ones: